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Linguistics Colloquium: Shifty Asymmetries: Universals and Variation in Shifty Indexicality

Amy Rose Deal, University of California, Berkeley
Friday, November 10, 2017
4:00-5:30 PM
116 Hutchins Hall Map
Abstract

Indexical shift is a phenomenon whereby indexicals embedded in speech and attitude reports depend for their reference on the speech/attitude report, rather than on the overall utterance. For example, in a language with indexical shift, "I" may refer to Bob in a sentence like "Who did Bob think I saw?". The last 15 years have seen an explosive growth in research on indexical shift cross-linguistically. In this talk, I discuss three major generalizations that emerge from this work, and present a theory that attempts to explain them. The account that I develop concerns the syntax of indexical shift along with its semantics, and has consequences for the linguistic encoding of attitudes de se. Throughout the talk I will exemplify indexical shift primarily, though by no means exclusively, with data from original fieldwork on Nez Perce.
Building: Hutchins Hall
Event Type: Lecture / Discussion
Tags: AEM Featured, colloquium, Discussion, Language
Source: Happening @ Michigan from Department of Linguistics